This invention relates to a transportation device useful for transporting primarily small articles such as pharmaceuticals (tablets, capsules, etc.), small cookies, candies, washers, button batteries, which are especially suited to visual inspections of those articles to be transported.
There are conventional transporting devices, for example, disclosed in (1) Japanese Patent Publication No. 035789/1982 and (2) Japanese Patent Publication No. 032125/1983, which are both associated with visual inspection of pharmaceutical tablets.
In the transporting device disclosed in Publication (1), a horizontal turntable is located in a stage following means arranging pharmaceutical tablets into substantially a straight line. The peripheral part of this turntable is constructed as a transparent loading surface, onto which the pallets aligned by the aligning means are successively fed in such a manner that upper and bottom surfaces and both sides (left and right) of individual loaded tablets are scanned by a television camera identifying the presence or absence of visual defects. The transparent loading surface contributes to enabling the bottom side of the tablet to be inspected. This device has an advantage which allows inspections with high precision of both left and right tablet side surface, because the major part of the bottom side of the individual tablet is kept at a distance from the loading surface. However, individual tablets just put on the transparent loading surface tend to deviate frequently from their normal running route under a centrifugal force of the turntable, preventing a precise visual inspection. Moreover, there is an important limitation to the transporting architecture, because any running route of the tablets should remain always in a certain horizontal plane, inhibiting any vertical transportation.
On the other hand, the transporting device disclosed in Publication (2) is provided with a plurality of pockets on the outer peripheral surface of a suction type rotary drum, the pockets being connected with the drum inside so that respective tablets in the pockets rotating together with the drum can be inspected. There are several disadvantages found for this device, i.e. the tablets may be damaged or broken sometimes by their forced contact with the pocket edges or bottoms when they enter the pockets or the transporting route may be stuffed by tablet jammings (congestions, crowdedness). Furthermore, this device requires a larger floor space for installing the rotary drum, as with the device described in Publication (1).